Highs and Lows in the Valley of Quito
Elaine Woods
Last year, I went to Quito, Ecuador as part of a volunteer programme organised by the international organisation EIL (Experiment in International Living), in which I lived with an Ecuadorian family, learnt Spanish, and worked as a volunteer on projects. Being away from family, friends, and everything familiar enables you become truly immersed into a different country and a different culture. Every volunteer has his or her own very different experience. Personally, I’ve never had so many consecutive emotional highs and lows as I did in my three months in Quito. I’m going to try and do my experience justice in words.
First Impressions…
Looking back, I don’t think I ever completely grasped exactly how big a step I was taking by going to live and work in a completely unknown country, and I had no expectations. To be honest, I never really had the time to think about it. I always wanted to do something like this and I had recently graduated and had the time. The period between booking it and actually getting on the flight in Madrid that sunny morning last March was spent fundraising, working in a demanding job, meeting my friends as much as possible before I left, seeing a boy that had inconveniently arrived on the scene, finding a flatmate to take my place, and tying up other loose ends. But then perhaps if I had have thought about it too much I never would have gone. So as my plane landed in Quito, the fear of the impending immigration officer at the airport (needless fear might I add) and the intrepidation of my first meeting with my Ecuadorian host family were mingled with the excitement of the truly unknown that lay ahead.
In Quito, I lived with my new mother and sister in an apartment overlooking Parque La Carolina, in the rich district. Instead of poorer living conditions as one might expect, my family had a maid to do the cooking and cleaning, which in itself was a culture shock. My mother Raquel had a high-flying job in the central bank of Ecuador, and she had built up quite the property portfolio. She was small with shoulder-length black hair that she would dye every 2 weeks. She had tattooed eyeliner and exuded an air of confidence that I admired. Her daughter Paola was more or less my age at 22. She was a student in an expensive university in Quito and had excellent English, thanks to her schooling and year of study in the states. She was tall, attractive, smoked as much as her mother, and talked constantly about her friend Hugo, with whom she was in love. Having met Hugo, I’ll never understand why!
And so I started my new life in Quito. I walked to Spanish lessons in the morning, dashing across busy roads full of aggressive drivers with little regard for traffic lights. After Spanish, I ventured out to explore the city. Quito is a long city, with a very poor south that was too dangerous to venture into, and a more prosperous north. A hill containing a statue of the Virgin of Quito separated the two sides. Colonial Quito contained open plazas, fountains, pickpockets and churches that were laden with gold and full of dubious looking statues that were refreshingly imperfect. Volcanoes surrounded the city, giving it its very own climate of sunny mornings and rainy afternoons. I walked the streets with only my Lonely Planet Guide for comfort. I visited an observatory where there were no English-speaking guides, I climbed the cathedral bell-tower and was absorbed by the enormity of the city I found myself in, and I clutched onto my bag on the cities trams on which I was the only visible foreigner. On my first weekend I went out to a club with Paola and her friends. I hadn’t brought any dancing clothes with me, I couldn’t speak Spanish, and I couldn’t dance the salsa and merengue that all around me were. I couldn’t even order anything at the bar as the barman didn’t understand me, and there was a pay-by-card system that no one had told me about. When I made to go home, Paola was drunk and quite aggressive, but she did get me a taxi. This was the first time I realised just how out of my depth I was in a foreign country with a foreign culture, and alone. But I knew that it was a once in a lifetime experience, and though I was often lonely in my months in Quito, I never once wished that I was back at home.
Volunteering…
After a month of Spanish lessons, I had 2 months of work. I chose to split my time between teaching English to children in a pre-school in Las Casas, a poor district of Quito, and working in Albergue La Dolorosa, a shelter for children whose families are unable to care for them. Having never done anything like this before, I didn’t know exactly what I was expected to do. I was teaching with an English girl, and we tried to plan lessons as best as we could, but it was often in vain in a class of very young children with a poor attention span and little desire to learn anything. In the children’s shelter, I played with the children, and helped one boy in particular with his homework every day. However, I still didn’t feel like I was actually doing anything. I had fundraised for the volunteer expenses, and so I felt this added pressure to really do something worthwhile. My poor Spanish was constantly a barrier between what I was, and what I wanted to be.
It didn’t help that I kept becoming sick, which made me very miserable. Things were going on back at home that I was missing, and I think it all just built up too much and there were a few days when all I could do was cry. I know Raquel and Paola were quite worried about me, and Paola came to talk to me to see what was wrong and I tried to explain it all to her. She told me that for a job to be satisfying, all you have to do is do it with love. That really changed my outlook on being a volunteer. I needed to stop worrying about what I was supposed to be doing, and just try and put as much of myself into what I was doing. She also told me that when something’s wrong, you should put your energy into changing it, rather than letting it get you down. These are really simple words, but I needed to be told them, and it is advice that I will always remember.
This was a turning point. In the school, I decided to really try to get the children to actually learn something, rather than just getting frustrated when they would not settle down. Admittedly, the situation didn’t get much better. The other teacher and I played musical chairs with the kids more often than taught them anything. In the shelter, I decided to use the extra time when the children were in school to re-decorate their playroom. I picked a sea-life theme, and painted murals of sea creatures on blue walls. When the children got back from school, they helped me out, often getting more paint on their clothes and feet than on the walls. There was paint on the carpet, huge drips on the walls, and one girl stood on a tube of paint that squirted all over the place. It really was a mess, and I had to reign in the perfectionist tendencies I sometimes have and try not to mind. It was really great working with the children, and they enjoyed it too. I have never been so stressed as I was about that playroom. I was leaving Quito in a few weeks and needed to get it finished before then. I had sleepless nights over it, and I feel stressed now even thinking about it, but it was completely worth it.
Happy Families…
My Ecuadorian mother Raquel was a very strong woman. Being a single mother and career woman in a country that is still very chauvinistic and where women can’t walk a few yards without the standard catcalls and whistles, she needed to be. She was sharp and I was quite scared of her. In my first weeks, I’d come home from Spanish lessons and she would ask me about my day, my life at home, etc. She was trying to help me, but I’d never spoken another language before and I was struggling with it. She would get frustrated whenever I didn’t understand her, and attempt to say it in English in a really loud voice that always felt like she was shouting at me. I would generally let something like that wash over me, but in Ecuador I was very vulnerable and sensitive, and I was often close to tears whilst attempting to speak to her. I dealt with this by basically retreating from her, and trying not to care. I didn’t see her as my mother or her apartment as my home. I stayed long hours at work and travelled whenever possible at the weekends with other volunteers, and had some fantastic experiences with them. They would talk about their good relationships with their host families, and I envied them. I questioned my relationship with my actual mother, and decided to make a more conscious effort when I got home. I should have made more of an effort with my Ecuadorian mother too, as the host family is all part of the experience.
To make matters worse, a previous host daughter of Raquel from Switzerland arrived to stay for a few weeks. Bianca was lovely: her warm open personality and fluent Spanish highlighted our differences. I’m quite reserved, and this is often construed by Latin-Americans to be cold. The whole saga is much too long for this story, but basically it culminated just before my final week in Ecuador. I went to visit my hosting organisation to get evaluation forms, and when the host organiser Myriam asked me how my family was, she wasn’t convinced with my reply of “good”. I decided to just go for it and spilt the whole story of the trials and tribulations with my host mother. Myriam was upset that I hadn’t told her earlier, as it often happens that families just don’t click with their host son or daughter, and new families can easily be found. It upset me further that perhaps I could have had a really good host family experience.
This was the lowest point of my time in Quito. I went back to the apartment still very upset and made a terrible attempt at explaining everything to Paola. Bianca thought it was her that was the problem and also got upset. It was absolutely a complete disaster. I’ve never been in a situation like that before, and I remember thinking at the time that I couldn’t believe that this was actually happening. But it had to happen, as it was a revelation of sorts. Once I had let everything out that had been building up in my head, I was able to look on the situation as an observer and see how it really was. Raquel had only ever looked out for me, and looked after me. Her nature was sharp, but I shouldn’t have taken it so much to heart. I am still ashamed about it all, but I had to learn the hard way how important it is to talk about things, as just letting thoughts build up in your head distorts them and only makes the situation worse. It is true that I didn’t click with my Ecuadorian mother as I would have liked, but I should have given it more of a chance.
The Last Week…
The air had been cleared, my Spanish was at its best and the playroom was nearly finished. After nearly three months the city was beginning to feel like home. I loved my journey to work in the morning when I could buy fruit on the street, converse with people in Spanish, jump on moving buses (something that I had put off doing for many weeks), run across the manic roads. One really memorable thing for me was buying curtains for the playroom. As I was dealing with the shop assistant in the drapery store, various customers would come over and try and help us figure out exactly what I wanted. When I had the material bought, the shop assistant took me down the street to a dressmaker, where another conversation of what exactly I was looking for ensued, again with the input of the other customers in the queue, and some pen and paper. It really was such a buzz being able to get by in a country in a way that I had never envisaged when I first arrived.
When I think of immersion, I think of being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool. That was how Quito was for me. At first I struggled, but bit by bit I learnt to swim. However, I never got quite as far as growing gills and breathing. It was time to move on from Quito, to go travelling, to meet more new people, and on the plane to Bolivia I was in need of a holiday! I was filled with relief that it had all gone well, happiness for the things my Ecuadorian mother had said to me on the way to the airport and that it had all been resolved, frustration at my inability to say what I would have liked to say back to Raquel and to the children I worked with, sadness that I had to leave it all behind.
I often think of my time in Ecuador but I rarely speak of it. I know I should, as part of the point of doing volunteer work is raising awareness of global issues, such as the insurmountable inequalities that can exist within one country, that exist in Ecuador. But it was a different world, and I find it hard to explain my time there to people. I am normally very stable, but immersion into a different country and a very different culture had the effect of magnifying everything that I was feeling, and I often questioned my sanity.
The experience made me appreciate how good my home country of Ireland is, and how lucky I am to have been born into a place where there are endless possibilities. Through the volunteer work, I realised that volunteering is a universal thing. There are always projects that need help, and you don’t have to go thousands of miles away to make a difference. On the surface I don’t think I’ve changed, but perhaps at a subconscious level I have developed the mechanisms to deal with being in a new place in a new situation with new people, as I found myself yet again in Guildford last September. I will always have the memories of Quito, but thankfully I left the highs and lows behind where they belong.
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